


Princess of the Sky

by luoup (ravenic)



Series: Flight [1]
Category: Kaze no Tani no Naushika | Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Studio Ghibli - Fandom
Genre: flight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 08:33:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5368604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenic/pseuds/luoup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She flies like the wind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Princess of the Sky

She has flown all her life.

Nausicaä was born to fly. In a world filled with poison, the Valley is only safe because of the winds that blow through it, day and night, without end. The sky is bright and free of toxins, and the grass that sways in the breeze is green and alive, with no sign of spore or rot.

Even as a tiny child, Nausicaä could always be found in the very tops of the massive windmills, and Mito rued the day she figured out how to open up the hatches and get onto the roofs. The tallest buildings in the Valley, the mills were the closest she could get to her beloved sky, and so she climbed them every day, any time she got the chance. For many years, the windmills were the young princess’s sky, her only way of flying.

Whether she was in the windmills –rather, on them – or lying in the fields of swaying grass, watching the clouds pass by, far above her head, her mind was always in the sky. _Head in the clouds,_ in the truest sense. She had dreamed of sprouting wings. Not that she wanted to fly away – not at all, never. Where would she go? The rest of the world was dead and poisonous, and everything she knew and cared about was here in the Valley. And the sky, her dearest love, was never far away. She just wanted to fly.

Mehve had been a dream come true. Finally, Nausicaä had wings – not wings of her own, not like the feathery limbs of the birds (and oh how she pitied Kai and Kui. Birds they may be, but flightless, and she could think of no punishment more painful.), but wings none the less. At last, she could fly for real – no longer only in her own mind, but in reality. She could go higher than the castle, higher even the towering windmills. Mito swore she flew so often and for so long that one day the glider was going to get stuck to her. She had laughed and said that she wouldn’t mind. Mehve was perfect. With Mehve, Nausicaä was free.

She could fly. Really fly, not just dream about it every day _(every single day)_ , and she took every chance she could get to run _(fly, fly, fly)_ to the hangar and take off.

Now that Nausicaä had wings, the world truly opened up to her. She could go anywhere, do anything. After all, there were no walls, no barriers, in the sky.

So of course she did what any good sky-loving, courageous princess would do. The Toxic Jungle was really the only place to go besides the Valley and the sea, and within a few years of getting Mehve, she was flying above the poisonous wastes, mask bound firmly to her face.

Mito shouted a lot and even Jihl seemed hesitant to allow his only daughter and heir to venture into such dangerous lands, but really, when had Nausicaä ever needed permission to do anything? Yupa taught her all that he knew about the Toxic Jungle, every time he came to visit the Valley, how to protect herself and stay safe, what the spores did and the name of each insect. Well, as safe as one could be while still inside the Jungle – and she took in every single word he had to give her, and learned even more on her own.

The Jungle fascinated Nausicaä. The plants, the fungi, the insects – it was all new and interesting and she could not get enough of it. It was a whole world. Never mind that she would die if she went five minutes without a mask – this was a universe that she could not stay away from. Even Mito had to admit that Nausicaä had some kind of connection with the insects that no one else had ever had before. It was uncanny, and then with the insect charm that Yupa gave her for her thirteenth birthday, she could do even more. The insects _followed_ her, in a way that they never did for any human. Despite all the terrible stories she had heard all her life, Nausicaä had no fear of the insects of the Toxic Jungle.

And the Ohmu. Of all the insects in the Jungle, the Ohmu were the only ones that had frightened her. Their sheer mass, their enormous eyes, so clearly telling whether they were calm or enraged, their huge claws and gigantic shell plates – the Ohmu were an overwhelming species to come face to face with.

But with time, Nausicaä lost her fear of the Ohmu and grew to love them more than any of the other insects. They had no flight – too large, too heavy – but their eyes, when they were calm and content, were the color of the sky that Nausicaä loved so much. They were the Jungle’s guardians, and Nausicaä adored them. She could fly right past one and it would stay stone still. She could land in an Ohmu nest without frightening them. She could calm a rage-red bull. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind could understand the Ohmu in a way that even the famous Lord Yupa could not. The Ohmu were hers.

If Mehve was a Yanma, light and agile, darting through the sky with no rival, the airships were like the great red rot-winged beetles – thick-bodied, clunky, and hardly able to lift them elves off of the ground. Nausicaä had little love for the bulky machines, but they could fly, however badly, and she had to respect that. Some of the bigger ships even looked a bit like an Ohmu might if someone had tied Mehve’s wings to its sides – definitely not something that was supposed to fly. But fly they did, and it was one of those ships, a Tolmekian barge, that changed everything in the world for ever.

The airships brought the Great Warrior. Nausicaä’s beloved sky brought the end of everything she had ever known. A single night, a burning airship, a dying girl, and then nothing was ever the same again.

It had been a nightmare of a night, and then with the dawn came more airships. Tolmekian again, but soldiers this time. So many soldiers, and the Valley was pacifist; they had nothing with which to defend themselves. Jhil could have fought, once, but he was sick now. And then he was dead, and Nausicaä, like the Ohmu she so loved, lost her mind for a moment, and everything turned red.

Yupa stopped her, but the damage had already been done. Nothing good ever came from red rage.

Asbel was red with rage too, at first. Even his ship was red, burning brilliantly with vengeance for his sister. That did no good either, and the insects swarmed, fueling their anger with his.

And then they had fallen, both of them – the princess of the Valley of the Wind, and the prince of Pejite, together.

Nausicaä had never loved being on the ground, but she had never thought to discover so much wonder _beneath_ the earth itself. She had known that the Jungle itself was not toxic, but to see what it was doing --- the trees were _killing themselves_ , to save the world from mankind’s poisons.

Down here, the sky was made of branches and roots.

Pejite was in danger, was hurt, but that could not excuse their actions. Ohmu were not made to fly. To see an Ohmu in the air made Nausicaä’s bones hurt. To see the sky itself turn scarlet with the Ohmu’s incoherent fury made her heart burn. She could not allow everything to end like this. Nausicaä could turn an Ohmu’s red eyes back to blue – she could do it to the sky itself too, she knew it.

 _He will come, clad in blue and surrounded by fields of gold._ And she had. But her blue was not her ordinary uniform, but a rose-colored gift from Pejite, an attempt to heal the wrongs they had done – red had done some good, at last – and her fields of gold were the feeler-threads of the Ohmu themselves. Her fields were not made of planted grain, rooted well in the soil. She strode through shimmering waves of yellow-bright Ohmu feelers, held high in the air. After all, although the Ohmu were beings of the earth, she was of the sky. Nature and humankind, earth and sky – everything was one, and Nausicaä was standing at the heart of it all.

It all came back to the sky, in the end. It was the sky she loved so much and the winds that she had worshipped all her life that brought the airship carrying the Great Warrior to the Valley, sparking the beginning of so much death and destruction. Who would have known that she herself, Nausicaä, princess of the wind, would be the one to fulfill the prophecy and bring peace to the land, and to the sky? But she did, and even the “fields of gold” from the prophecy were the feelers of the Ohmu, holding her high and safe, in the air where she belonged.

In the end, everything came back to the sky.


End file.
